East Asian popular culture and inter-Asian referencingneither aims to elucidate modern Asian experiences in essentialist terms, nor attempts to draw a
contrast to or separate from Western and other non-Western experiences. By reengaging deep-
seated Western inflections on Asian experiences, an inspired inter-Asian comparison and refer-
encing aims to refreshingly elucidate and theorize specific processes in which the experiences
of Asian modernizations have been formulated, whereby the production of knowledge derived
from Asian experiences leads to the articulation of visions and values translocally relevant for
transmuting not just Asian societies but also for other parts of the world. As such, inter-Asian
referencing must be distinguished from parochial regionalism as it does not exclude researchers
working in and on contexts outside of Asia nor does it underestimate the significance of trans-
national collaboration with scholars in other locations. It can be considered a productive detour
to provincialization.
Inter-asian referencing
Reflecting on the substantial development of the study of East Asian popular culture, Chua
Beng Huat (2010; 2011) proposes that cultural studies scholars working in Asia should make
conscious efforts to advance inter-Asian referencing in a more deliberate manner. He contends
that localized (re)conceptualization and theorization in Asian contexts with refined uses of
local terminologies and concepts rather than straightforwardly using English concepts is a nec-
essary first step. Inter-Asian referencing renders such concepts not just unique to one particu-
lar (non-Western) location but translocally applicable. One example he refers to is Sun Jung’s
(2011) conceptualization of “mugukjeok” (a “positive quality of mobility, of being unbounded by
nations”) in the South Korean context, which he thinks offers more relevant nuances than an
English term such as transnational (Chua 2011, 44). Jung develops the concept by referring to the
notion of mukokuseki, which I conceptualized in the Japanese context. As I discussed elsewhere
(Iwabuchi 2002, 28), “mukokuseki literally means something or someone lacking any nationality,
but also implies the erasure of racial or ethnic characteristics or a context, which does not imprint
a particular culture or country with these features.” Such erasure is intentionally or uninten-
tionally made in the processes of cultural mixing and the juxtaposition of multiple “local” and
“foreign” elements (the term mukokuseki was first coined in the early 1960s to describe a new
action-film genre in Japan that parodied Hollywood Western films such as Shane). I used the
Japanese concept to discuss how some Japanese animations and video games that did not really
represent any tangible ethnocultural characteristics of Japan had become well received in many
parts of the world. Referring to my conceptualization of mukokuseki, Jung (2011) further devel-
ops the notion in her analysis of the rise of South Korean popular culture, using an equivalent
Korean term, mugukjeok. Jung explicates the process of cultural mixing and transculturation of
“Koreanness” (especially in terms of masculinity) in South Korea and discusses how it enhances
the cross-border mobility of South Korean popular culture, including pop stars and films. Jung’s
inter-Asian referencing expands the notion of mukokuseki in two interrelated senses. First of all,
it makes the conceptualization translocally relevant and applicable to a wider range of popular
culture. More significantly, it also shows how attending to a similar but different experience in
East Asia generates a sophisticated understanding of the interaction between transculturation
and cross-border mobility of popular cultures, which is in turn applied and further developed
outside South Korea (and not limited to Asia). It is this mutual learning process that enables
inter-Asian referencing to contribute to the innovative production of knowledge.
In order to make such inter-Asian referencing more active and systematic, it is necessary to
historicize whether and how popular culture production, circulation, and consumption have
been materializing a cultural geography of East Asia. As Younghan Cho explores in the previous